Post 152—A Place for Spanking

I hope you don’t get tired of my apologies and my changes in direction or even promises not kept—which is not the same in my mind about breaking promises.  The document that I thought I would discuss in follow up from the last post is not what I expected it to be. So, we will let it go and do something else today. However, in case you’re curious, here’s URL that deals with issues somewhat related to that of Post 151--

               

       https://arpacanada.ca/news/2017/02/14/thoughts-religious-                                           tolerance/#feature

Yes, something else, but not something completely different. While the last post talked about shooting and murdering, this post will talk about spanking. To some people that’s in the same class as shooting and murder—it’s all doing violence to people.  Some time ago a friend of mine, Mark Penninga, the Executive Director of the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada published an opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun under the title”Time and Place for Spanking.” I’ve written about this issue before, because I believe when a government gets involved in ordinary family affairs, it is intrusive and goes far beyond its legitimate reach.  Government and family exist in different spheres, each of which have their own laws and protocols. Governments may only interfere in families when there is evidence of families being highly dysfunctional. To some people, spanking, any kind of spanking, no matter its severity, becomes the government’s business, for its mandate is to protect its citizens, even infants, from violence, including parental violence.   

Penninga’s main point is that the term spanking covers a broad range of meaning, ranging from the gently corrective to that of the cruel and abusive. Attempts to have government make every form of spanking illegal in order to prevent the cruel type, has the opposite effect.  Then he demonstrates his point at length, all of which you can read yourself by turning to the articles’ URL (see below). One study, for example, that covered 50 years and examined 26 other studies concluded, “Whether physical punishment compared favorably or unfavorably with other tactics depended on the type of physical punishment.” The study looked at what the researchers called an “optimal” type of physical discipline — conditional spanking—and upheld it as legitimate.

Penninga wrote:

Sweden in 1979 became the first nation to outlaw all physical discipline. Since then, criminal charges for physical child abuse by relatives against children under age seven increased by 489 per cent between 1981 and 1994. There was also a shocking 519-per-cent increase in criminal assaults by children under 15 against children aged 7-14. Perhaps most devastating, 46-60 per cent of cases investigated under Sweden’s law result in children being removed from homes. About 22,000 Swedish children were removed from homes in 1981, compared with 1,900 in Germany, 710 in Denmark, 552 in Finland, and 163 in Norway.

Consider the 2010 case of a mother and father from Karlstad, Sweden, jailed for nine months and ordered to pay 25,000 kronor ($11,000) to three of their children who were spanked. More damaging than the jail and fines, all four of their children were removed from their home. Although the court concluded that the parents “had a loving and caring relationship to their children,” apparently spanking is serious enough to merit such an extreme sentence.

And then he concluded,

Parents will have a variety of opinions about the merits of physical discipline. But problems arise when the state assumes the role of parent. The role of the state is limited to preserving an orderly society and punishing wrongdoers (including child There is much that the state can do to promote a society in which children are safe and families can flourish. Banning physical discipline will achieve neither.

Parents will have a variety of opinions about the merits of physical discipline. But problems arise when the state assumes the role of parent. The role of the state is limited to preserving an orderly society and punishing wrongdoers (including child abusers), so that the other institutions of society can flourish. The institution of the family is an independent part of civil society accountable directly to God (although the state increasingly understands itself to be a god it seems). Parents are entrusted with the authority to lovingly raise their children and the state may only interfere in exceptional circumstances, such as real child abuse.

There is much that the state can do to promote a society in which children are safe and families can flourish. Banning physical discipline will achieve neither.  So far my friend Penninga. 

The Vancouver Sun published an editorial supporting Penninga’s main argument, while the highest court of the land agreed as well, but not everyone did, as you can see on the last of the three websites that appear below. As to myself, I am the product of a tradition of occasional reasonable spanking when deserved and emerged a humane, highly educated and successful person from a peasant background without any spanking baggage to sour my life. The same holds true for all 9 of my siblings as well as for the 11 and 9 siblings of my father and mother respectively. As the Bible puts it, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” That’s ancient wisdom that liberals tend to deny, often having contempt for the past and its ways.

So, here are three URLs for you to check out, with the third one vigorously rejecting the point of this post.

 http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Opinion+Time+place+spanking/11049750/story.html.

See also www.keep43.can for supporting arguments.

            See www.nospank.net for opposing view.

Post 129 –Calvin Helin’s Aboriginal Critique and Solution

Back in Post 123 on August 30, I wrote about Calvin Helin, to whom I referred as one hell of an Aboriginal whom I really want to meet some day.  I sort of half promised that I would one day give you a few summaries from the book he wrote, Dances with Dependency. It is the most honest and most brutal book about Aboriginals I have ever read—and Helin is an Aboriginal. His stuff is from the inside, from the cradle of his own people. 

So, here’s the very first paragraph of text from the Preface, the opening salvo, if you like:

The purpose of this book is to look at practical ways to move indigenous populations forward. Money has been liberally thrown at Indian problems with nominal impact. Neither mainstream nor indigenous politics has had lasting widespread impact on improving the lives of ordinary indigenous folk, no matter how many hyped political announcements and other solutions have been touted. It is time to look at the problems and issues at the broadest level in order to seek general solutions that might be tailored to the different circumstances of Tribes now.

I expect every person of goodwill will shout an affirmative “Amen!” to this opening salvo. “Money liberally thrown” with little impact—that sounds like the sad case of Vancouver’s Down Town East Side, where a million is being spent every day with little or no impact over the years.

Moving on to p. 25, after he gives a short vivid description of the traditional and comparatively sophisticated economics and politics of his people along the coast of British Columbia, he writes:

My father was a commercial fisherman and a fine one. Though he had made a good life for our family, I was well aware that life in an Aboriginal Indian reserve had a very sinister side to it. Such a bad environment has persisted so long in most Aboriginal communities that many Aboriginal  people have, over generations, been socialized into thinking that this widespread dysfunction is normal. Imagine a situation where tragically high youth suicide rates, gross unemployment figures, frequent banana republic-style corruption, and persistent abuse—both substance and physical—prevail, and you might begin to understand what life is like on many Aboriginal reserves.

Towards the end of Chapter 1, Helin presents us with a general journey that Aboriginals must embark upon with the concrete details worked out in the rest of his book. Here are some of his phrases and statements from pp. 36 and 39: 

“Aboriginal citizens must…squarely face the Industry of Non-Aboriginal Hucksters, and ‘consultants,’ and those Aboriginal politicians who are openly profiting from this sea of despair and poverty. In spite of what they say, this ‘Indian Industry’ has no real interest in changing a system from which they are profiting.”

“the unkind hands of the welfare trap.”

Families are falling “as casualties of a fatal ‘welfare syndrome’—one that is literally stealing the lives and hopes of our future generation….”

“We must shake off the apathy of what has become an all too comfortable ‘cloak of welfare’….”

With reference to the economic opportunities available to his people, he writes, “To exploit these opportunities will require a fundamental change in the dependency mindset of Aboriginal people. For lasting solutions, decisions have to come from Aboriginal people themselves. Aboriginals have to consciously choose a more beneficial path than the dependency course they are currently on—and have the conviction to live with the consequences.”

The pursuit of economic opportunities before them, “could lead to the Holy Grail of rediscovered independence and self-reliance. It is time to re-take control of our lives from government departments, bureaucrats and the Indian Industry.”

Well, if you think the above sentiments and observations are racist, coming as they do at this point from a Caucasian writer, you’ll have to take it up with Helin himself, a man with all of his roots deeply entangled with Aboriginal history and culture—and, I should emphasize, full of passionate love for his  people. I suppose you could push this a bit farther by saying that my choosing to quote all this and bring it to a wider public is racist. Well, go ahead, if that makes you feel better.

I have long been concerned with the state of the Aboriginal people in Canada. In fact, when I first returned to Canada as a “retired” person after 43 years, I actually hoped to do a serious study on the subject and publish its result. Because of my life’s work, I ended up focusing on Islam and wrote a series of eight books along with quite a number of articles on that subject, all of which are available to you free of charge on the Islamica page of my website < SocialTheology.com.> So, I never got around to Aboriginal issues, but I have a large archive of Aboriginal articles collected for that purpose. If any reader is interested in that archival material, contact me. I am prepared to donate them it of charge to any party who is seriously involved in Aboriginal affairs, especially Aboriginals themselves, even more especially to Helin, who has become a hero of mine. If any reader knows him, please draw his attention to my offer and to these posts in this blog.